


Rapier

by BlackberryAvar



Category: Original Work, War Thunder (Video Game)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-06
Updated: 2020-11-06
Packaged: 2021-03-08 19:22:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,623
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27421900
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BlackberryAvar/pseuds/BlackberryAvar
Summary: A random posting about flying fighter jets that I wrote up because I felt like it (may be considered vore by all ye perverts on AO3). May be turned into a serial.





	Rapier

**Author's Note:**

> Rapier does kick-ass flying, then meets an adversary crazier even than him. The only thing more devastating than one badass is two.

The  venerable P-51 D dived into the cover of a cloud bank when the rumble of a jet engine reached his pitot tubes. He looked around, well aware that if the jettius was flying broadside to him the sound would not be where the jet was but well behind it, should it be subsonic. If it was supersonic he would be safe,  for supersonics did not bother with small, hard-to-hit props. They were too busy keeping their speed up.

The  S. alpha-cinconius  flashed by with a glint of light, rolled over his canopy, and zoom climbed with a roar. It looped a mile above him, then came down from its apex like a charging tiger; inevitable and unstoppable.

But not unavoidable.  The fifty-one yawed and let the crowd go by. The alpha waggled its wingtips once it had passed him, and then the fifty-one knew it had only been playing.

That Saber was young, happy-go-lucky, and thought he  knew everything and could beat anything.  The inborn lessons transferred genetically from sire to son  gave him powerful instinct, for his sire had been wise in his time, and that experience made for a powerful bloodline.  The Saber knew how to roll his way out of trouble: how to manage his speed and why he should do it,  and he even had an inkling sometimes of how to manage a reversal; he was a fighter through and through, and preying on ground targets was a resort only for the most troubling of times.

Heretofore he had made his meals on props. Now he was satiated of fuel tank, and he wanted a challenge.

He found it in a MiG. Or rather, the MiG found him. He was cruising along at fifteen thousand feet in the afternoon, heading east with the sun at his back. Suddenly his tail grew cold: there was a shadow on him, though he had cruised into a clear sky. Even as he realized there was something behind him he was already rolling and pulling two Gs in a shallow dive, picking up speed. Behind him the cantilevered form of a MiG-XVII poked into his peripherals before it slotted into his six again.

The  MiG had dropped into him on a pursuit curve, and while it could pull more Gs than he could and not lose speed, any potential missiles it had were nullified by the fact that its pull surely exceeded 2Gs,  the pull at which  the lesser missiles  would ‘go stupid’ and miss. Now the challenger must close to range a gun attack. Being of a higher caliber, the challenger would be careful with his ammunition, as it would take a long time to regenerate.

His pitot tubes told him he was holding steady in airspeed at five-hundred mph, yet the MiG would soon have him in its gunsights. He needed to tighten the turn or roll off. He applied careful rudder pressure, rolling more so his nose would stay down, enough to maintain five-hundred, and now the MiG  could not catch him. It pulled up  into a  late high yo-yo,  its nose barely behind his tail.

A thought came to him, the bare formation of a thought.  He rolled outwards and back in, and the MiG continued to gain altitude above him, as though confused.  He pulled up and the MiG rolled, hanging on one wing. It saw him – four hundred, three-fifty – and turned, sealing its fate. He shot its tail away, and while it had lost control he flew with it for a while, nudging its wing with his slipstream wash to keep it flying the way he wanted it while he thought about how to best kill it and simultaneously eat it.

Even with its tail shot away and its fuselage buffeting fit to break away, the MiG was as fast as he was, and he had to  strain his engine to keep up with it. He would remember that power, but for now, it was lights out. Six fifty caliber acidics splattered its canopy and put it out of its misery, and he sank his hook into it and piggy-backed on its still-lit engine, digesting it till the only thing left was the shell, which he let drop  as carrion for the Chaffees.

Victory was satisfying – and satiating.

There was so much more in his future.  It came at him in a torrent, and he swam  it audaciously, mastering the current which at any moment was trying to sweep him away.  Life was a collection of anecdotes, hideously organized; then it was  a vivid montage of his best kills, and then, in his worse days, when he was bereft of food and in a bad temper, life mocked him  and his empty fuel tank.  It reminded him of his siblings – all dead now – and often had him perusing the air by his wings, expecting  a companion  and seeing only empty space for the thousandth time.

The Saber was coming into the prime of his life; a dancing sword,  renting the air with bullets and slicing it with razor wings, he was invincible. He was also miserable. He was pushing himself to great feats, each more dangerous and grandiose than the last; throwing himself into situations no sane aircraft would consider  and coming out unscathed,  pushing himself to the brink for the  feeling,  the feeling of being in the moment with his mind fixated on winning, with no time to think about the broader life questions, just the here and now – kill or be killed.

He was at the cutting edge of what it meant to be a fighter, diving past inversion speed for the hell of it, going so fast he couldn’t hear the roar of his engine  behind him,  or feel the rumbling of the turbofans.

He was accruing a reputation, a legend.  A name.

They called him Rapier.

On and on he flew to new heights,  and higher still were the tales of his power. He was a plane straight out of folk stories, they said, and given the nature of his exploits it was hard to say  where the lore ended and the myth began.  He flew to the  mountain eyries  of the Phantoms and their ilk, where the supersonics live,  and bamboozled one so much  it went into a flat-spin, while the rest chased him off with missiles (which doubtless he avoided).  He didn’t need missiles to hunt! Missiles, he decided, were for weaklings, and he tried to prove this at every opportunity.

At length he decided to quit with the hijinks, and work out his internal troubles, for even he realized that sooner or later he’d meet an opponent he couldn’t beat.  His mood was icy when he came back from his sojourns and into the hilly lands where he was born,  and it grew icier still  when he  found the air he’d intended to putter around in was occupied  by another  S .  alpha-cinconius,  a male, about his age  from the looks of it, and a know-it-all.

Rapier thought – no, he knew it would be easy to beat the guy.  He screamed around his territory  at full throttle, terrorizing the cloud-feeders, ripping through their formations before they heard him coming, and vanishing ere they could get off a shot,  oft with a piece of aileron or elevator tucked safely under his wing, a morsel to fuel his restlessness.  Even on hiatus from challenging himself he wasn’t done wreaking havoc, not him, not ever.

Then he found his challenger.  There was a thick cloud layer that day, the B-17s feeding off the ethereal mists like it was their bread and butter. They peered around cautiously, knowing that besides their usual predators there was a more potent terror about. The whine of  a jet engine made them prick up their  turrets,  no doubt. There were two prowling in the fog, one on each side.  They passed, dove, and met. 

Rapier saw the oncoming Saber a moment before the other saw him, fired, half-rolled, and slipped into the darkness,  climbing at four hundred miles per  and looking behind him for any sign of the challenger.  He did not want to go slower; speed was love, speed was life, and if he lost it he was dead meat  for anyone who came along.  At length he perceived there was another jet whining in the clouds;  he had not killed the Saber; the Saber was still trying to kill him.  He pulled  a 1G turn – a soft one at the speeds he was going –  and made  a wide circle out to where he’d been.

Whereupon the Saber bounced him. At this speed the bullets came before the sound of the guns, and the tracers flashed by his canopy, white vapor streaks visible for a second before they vanished in the clouds. Rapier used his rudder to make it look like he was going one way when he was actually flying another, then slipped away like a mirage drying up in a desert. He had a good idea of where his opponent was now, and his opponent was smart enough to have a bead on him.

The other jet  must’ve dove under his turn,  picking up enough speed to get shots on him.  He had had more energy when he’d been shot at, but the evasive maneuvers had bled  altitude .  They were on equal terms.

He had to get the other guy out in front.  Slowly he decreased his throttle, pitching down a bit to keep his speed  steady.  Then he rolled and  pulled 2Gs  left .  The whine of the Saber’s engine built  behind him, high-pitched and loud  as the distance closed, faster and faster,  and the two jets broke the bottom of the cloud cover, silver metal catching the green glow of the earth beneath,  the Saber outside his turn and  cutting beneath it,  too fast  to pull into Rapier. 

Suddenly the Saber  flicked  his wings and pulled up, rolling  outwards as he went high and back in when he came low.  If the adversary chopped into his turn - 

Out came Rapier’s airbrake, and he  reversed course to the right, wings  mismatched with the opponent, pulling minimal Gs with the elevator, keeping as much speed as he dared and dumping  the rest.  Too slow.  Tracer s raked  the air beside him and  bounced off the ground – too close!  His wings scraped a tree  on the pullout,  and the Saber’ s intake  mowed the grass  as the two planes raced  down the slope of a mountain as if playing  a deadly game of tag.

For the first time, Rapier wasn’t ‘it’.

More bullets;  rudder and pitch and luck  kept him mostly unscathed,  though rounds nicked his wing  and cut the thin surface.  Tiny droplets of fuel  esc aped, hissing,  and Rapier employed a desperate move.

He fla t-plated the bird.  The sudden up-pitch  drained his speed beneath the three-hundred mark – two-fifty now, dropping ever lower as he pulled in the airbrake and rolled onto his back,  buffeting at the tail as he  drew near an accelerated stall.  His attention flicked to his adversary.

The Saber had taken the bait.  He too had pulled up, was rising straight into Rapier’s guns – yet saw the danger and lithely pulled away.

The energy dogfight became a  scissors; each  F-86 seeking to  minimize their turning circle and get a bead on the other.  They passed, fired – too high, too low.  They couldn’t dive because of the ground, and they could barely climb at the speeds they were flying at – a hundred and forty to two-ten.  Rapier fired in short bursts because he was running low on ammunition.

He took another shot and the guns clicked empty; there was no ammo.  The enemy rolled over and down to his tail – click.

They were in a funny predicament now.  No ammo meant no way to hunt – little means to get food.  The only way was to scavenge other plane’s kills  until he regrew enough ammunition to fend for himself.

He saw the jet before he heard it;  a Phantom rolling in at supersonic speeds.  Rapier rolled a full circle, then pulled for the weeds, dreading the  fwoosh of the incoming missile and the explosion that would end his life. It came, but not close enough to kill him; the Sidewinder had been decoyed by his movements and dove straight into the ground.  Thunder rumbled and bullets cracked, and the twin-engined F-4 flashed by his canopy and disappeared into the distance. Once they missed, they rarely came back for a second pass.

The Saber was still with him.

At first they’d been deadly rivals, and now they were near inseparable, their friendship founded on the bedrock which grounds the circles of young men: conflict.  The two F-86s raced in the mornings and played grabtail in the evenings, and scavenged in the time between.

Their first catch was a Messerschmitt  109 ,  one which  had been  shot up in the prop furballs  and pulled a hard turn when it saw the jets. It was too much; its wing gave up the ghost and it tumbled into a flatspin.  Rapier caught the win g  and Saber caught the other wing and they divvied it up from there.  After that things only got better.

Even Ilyushins died under their accurate .50 cal firepower, and unlucky MiGs or Swifts melted, their wings ripped off by the streams of flying bullets.

One day  they encountered a Scimitar.

The fat twin-engine was flying low and fast, as was jets’ custom; it saw Rapier a moment before  he saw it, and endeavored to bounce him before he could react.

He rolled multiple times, applying up and down pitch, and the minute movements threw the Scimitar’s deadly 30mm shells off by the space of a wingspan. At this altitude the Scimitar had little speed over Rapier, but it did have excess thrust. It nosed up 20 degrees, overshot, and powered on, leaving Rapier in the weeds with less speed and less power.

In came Saber, diving from a higher altitude, but he missed with his first pass, and the recoil put him out of range for a second.  Now they were in a pretty pickle. Both Rapier and Saber knew how to defensive fly,  but that meant little against an enemy  that could break away and reengage at will.  What they needed was to sucker the Scimitar into a turnfight with one of the F-86s so  it’d be an easy target.

There was always the always the danger of other jets running around, or even props.

Down came the Scimitar, flush with energy from his climb. Rapier let the blue-painted enemy come down on his six, then pulled six Gs in a turn both right and slightly up,  bleeding speed without using his airbrake  as the Scimitar drifted outside his turn, rolling and pulling but not yawing as Rapier eased to a stressful 5Gs,  still turning, still pitching the nose up.

Now the Scimitar’s awesome rate of climb was used against it; it was too fast to pull guns on Rapier, and there was no choice but to overshoot. It pitched straight up and opened the throttle, rocketing  skyward and arrowing past Rapier.

On his own he would never have shot it; he had bled too much speed. Unluckily for the Scimitar, he had Saber. A beam of .50 cals sliced the air and drilled neat holes in the Scimitar, and then Rapier’s friend flashed past with the sun gleaming off his bare metal. The Scimitar’s engines sputtered, then died, and it  collapsed midair, wing tanks leaking precious fuel.

That night’s feast was kingly and well-deserved. Rapier had learned a valuable lesson about Scimitars, too. At high speeds they could hardly yaw.


End file.
